One event I have noticed that they tried in Freedom Summer was the freedom vote, the freedom vote was a away for the group to try to get America's attention on their cause because they knew that they could not fix the problem in Mississippi without help. This taught them that they would have to work together to fix the problem. The freedom school project showed the group how many people wanted to solve the problem, they expected about 1000 people to show up when they got 3000. I thought that was interesting to see the amount of people that showed up for support.
Dealing with the sexism in freedom summer some of the personal accounts were interesting and history books from high school never talk about sexism in the civil rights movement.
But getting back to the events that caused the group to change their view on the subject was the amount of violence that was taken out on them. It made them realize and see again that this wasnt going to be easy.
For example kidnappings, murders and public beatings.
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Ah, ha! People working together to solve a problem, what a novel idea! Again, we do need to place the specific events in Mississippi in 1964 in a larger context of national politics, to see the significance of these numbers turning out to support the Freedom Schools, and take a stand for theie exercise of democracy. On another blog comment, I observed that black Mississippians were the numerical majority in their state; they did indeed make a powerful statement by organizing the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party as an alternative to the "regular" all-white Democrats. But we should also see again, the inability of the national party leaders to take risks by acknowledging the MFDP, and their overarching concern with not offending the segregationists. When we realize the impact of this problem, we can see even more so why other people from other states needed to give active support to the movement, and why the students who volunteered were taking steps to do so.
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